How to E-Mail a Photo in Windows E-Mail Programs

The most common kind of file to e-mail is a photo and the easiest way to do it is overlooked by far too many people. Follow these steps to e-mail a picture file the easy way:

Open the folder containing the image you want to e-mail.

You were thinking that you needed to be in your e-mail program for this task. Nope.

Right-click the image file to send.

Choose Send To→Mail Recipient from the shortcut menu.

An image-size-adjustment dialog box appears; in Windows XP, the dialog box offers only two choices: Make All My Pictures Smaller or Keep the Original Sizes.

Choose a size for the image and then click the Attach button.

The button is labeled OK in Windows XP.

If prompted in Windows XP, choose an e-mail profile.

You should be using separate user accounts for your e-mail, not a single account on the computer with multiple e-mail accounts.

Your e-mail program starts, creating a new message with the image file automatically attached. Depending on the program, the Subject line may reflect the attachment and the message body may contain information about the attachment and a warning about computer viruses.

Type the recipient’s address.

Edit the Subject line, in case the one that’s automatically used seems vague and meaningless.

Type the message body.

Feel free to edit any text placed automatically in the body by Windows.

Click the Send button.

There’s no need to close your e-mail program after sending; only the New Message window appears; then the message is sent and you’re back to doing whatever distracts you from getting real work done.

The method described in these steps helps address the biggest issue with sending photos: sending them in a convenient size.

Of course, another way to send a smaller-size image is to use an image-editing program to reset the image’s size. Then again, going through those steps either alters the image’s original size or gives you two copies of the same image on your PC: one small for e-mail and the larger, original copy.

You can right-click any file icon to send it, similar to the way you send an image.

Although it’s possible to make a large image smaller, it’s not quite as easy to make a small image larger. If the image is already small, making it larger just makes it fuzzy.

Store your digital photographs in a large format. The larger file format is a must for image editing. Also, larger picture files print better than smaller ones that might be better suited for attaching to an e-mail message. Just remember to resize your images when sending them as an e-mail attachment.